I mentioned earlier that I didn’t plan to create any new characters for the Retropolis Rocket Ship picture. Then I showed you the one I made. Well, I guess I’ve done it again.

I’d gotten pretty interested in the new gear – the space helmet and gauntlets – that you saw in that earlier update. That’s how today’s spacewoman started out. With a similar air tank, her new and different helmet and gloves grew into a whole new character.

I have an excuse for that: last year I made pretty good progress on the illustrations for The Riddle of the Wrong Brain (Part Two of The Toaster With Two Brains) but almost immediately afterward I worked out a whole new system for generating character heads, using morph targets instead of facial bones, and the results were so good that I was left staring at my formerly new characters and wishing that I could do them over.

In fact I did do over both Gwen and Nat, who are our main protagonists in that story, and Zeno, Doctor Rognvald’s henchman; but I was still left with a couple of new or newish characters that I’d built with the old system. This character’s head is a replacement for the head I originally built for one of those characters. So on the one hand I have a new character to use in the Rocket Ship picture, while on the other hand I have a new and improved head for Stella Moya, whom you have yet to meet.

I have to admit, though, I’m pretty happy with the way this version of her turned out; I’m sure I’ll be using her again. Sometimes I feel like I’m an old movie studio producer who keeps casting the same lead actors and character actors in an entire slate of movies. This would be one of those times.